Observation day! Online Reflection #2

Hello all,
As the days are coming to an end and the wrap up of Core III is starting, I start to see the end in site. With my students looking for me and asking more about me, I start to wonder just how much of a difference that I am making in their lives. Although I know I'm making more of a difference than I can see right now, I do have several students that have opened up about that difference. It's always nice to hear.

Within my lesson, I got to see a great amount of what my students are all about. Some with more creativity than I ever knew they had. Some with personality beaming  within their assignments and discussions.

The word Prejudice comes with my different connotations... My students started my lesson with a few moans and whiny comments. First a quick write, What do you know about the word Prejudice? What is your definition of prejudice? Have you heard about it? Where? Have you ever been the victim of it? Have you ever done it to someone else? With most students claiming that prejudice does not happen anymore. A simple chuckle is all I had.

Our first start with a old school text about prejudice, "Montgomery Boycott" which is about Rose Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Popular text within the word of prejudice for obvious reasons. Next we worked through our first lesson: the Prejudice Alphabet. I gave all of the students a notecard that had words about several different types of prejudice or words that had to do with prejudice: some of the words Ageism, Biology, Caste, Classism, "Driving While Black", Ethnic cleansing, Faith, Genocide,
Gender, Homosexuality,  Imperialism,  J'accuse and so on. All the letters of the alphabet. I told them that we were going to the library and that they were to find an article about their word and they would have to explain what it had to do with prejudice. Then for homework, they needed to read the article, circle and define 5 vocabulary words that they found within their articles, summary their articles and underline any main ideas that they found.

The next class, the students grouped together and had a discussion about their words and what their article was about. I saw more personality come out of my quieter students who I gave some pretty different words and who found some extremely interesting articles. I had each group nominate one person who they thought found the most interesting article and I saw most of my students who got up to speak were the quiet ones.

After this, I had my students watch some videos about prejudice. Even though I had to push through a few of them, I got a lot of information and feelings out of my students, especially anger and frustrations. Who would have guessed that most of these students had experienced some sort of prejudice without even knowing.

The next day, we watched some more of the videos in hopes to invoke some conversation. Then we went over one pagers homework of stories about prejudice. Finally, we looked at "poems" that had something to do with prejudice. After letting the students look through these poems and allowing them to decide how they would present this to a group of people, I had one student from each group to recite their poem. The students rocked out on the poetry reads then I showed them exactly how artist sang these poems which were song lyrics. Most of the students were shocked about how much prejudice and talks of prejudice were in these lyrics.

Overall I believe my lesson was successful. Although I am still looking for more things on prejudice to be able to teach in my future classes. I have done some reading on To Kill a Mockingbird which is a popular Prejudice novel and found some interesting topics including the link I have posted: http://teachingtokillamockingbird.com/teaching-theme-in-to-kill-a-mockingbird/

What other things do people have? How do I encourage my students to want to read more of these "classic" texts without hating it?

That's all for now
Ms Perret

Oh just a side note about what is going on within my subbing life. Last week, I spent a couple of days at the same school teaching gym. Super fun. But I meant a young student, I shall call him Mr. Man Bun, he had the greatest bun that I have seen ever in my life. After talking with this student, I learned that he didn't like PE at all and refused to "suit out" but had fun playing the games that we were doing. We had a long conversation about how PE is part of their graduation plan and he wanted to know why that was and of course, I did not have an answer for him. He then told me that wearing a gym shirt is how they get most of their points for PE so it does not matter if they are participating or not, if they don't have the shirt they would fail. I also thought that was weird because several of the students did not have their gym shirts on. Shocked that most of the students thought that after not buying a PE shirt, they were still going to be able to pass PE which they were then told was not going to be able to happen.

How do you get students to want to participate in classes like this? And how do we get students to see that as a freshman, everything that they do matters?